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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

At
first I thought I missed it. I am by no means infallible, and though I’d read
certain passages within God’s Word vehemently contradicting what I was hearing
from not one, or two, but more and more preachers and teachers – and continue to
hear to this day – I was open to the possibility that perhaps I’d read certain
passages too fast, or didn’t see certain words as I ought have.

There
were too many men claiming certain theories as undeniable fact, and doing so
with such authority and vehemence that I began to wonder if I’d somehow missed
the boat, if I’d somehow misread the Word and had for all these years decided
to make life harder on myself just because I was striving for some unattainable
figment of my own imagining.

Persecution
hasn’t even started in America, yet more and more believers are looking for
justification and permission to deny Jesus, save their skin, and apologize
later. If, as some major Christian figures have stated we can be first in line
for the mark of the beast and still make it into heaven long before the door is
shut, who is a little denial of one’s Lord and Savior going to harm?

It’s
not like we would really mean it, and we can always apologize after the fact,
having been wise enough to spare ourselves undue distress.

Save
for the Gospel, the excuses, justifications, and explanations we give to
ourselves for having hypothetically denied Jesus if we were ever called upon to
suffer for His name’s sake, are plausible and would even serve to appease our
burdened conscience for a season.

It
is the Gospel that dispels these childish notions, and clarifies this position
once and for all.

I
did. I wanted to be sure. I went back and read all the relevant passages, and though
I find myself in the minority, I realize I didn’t miss it on this one, and when
Jesus said, ‘If you deny me before men, I
will deny you before my Father in heaven,’ He didn’t qualify it at all.

He
didn’t say, ‘If you deny me before men,
and really mean it,’ or ‘if you deny
me before men and don’t cross your fingers before you do,’ or, ‘if you deny me before men and don’t
apologize afterwards.’

Matthew 10:33, “But
whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in
heaven.”

Mathew 10:38, “And
he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”

Matthew 16:25, “For
whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for
My name’s sake will find it.”

Maybe
it’s just my translation of the Bible. I’ll bet that’s what it is. There couldn’t
really be that many preachers out there teaching things contrary to the words
of Jesus just to placate the cowards in their pews could there?

I’m
sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are no qualifiers when it comes
to denying Jesus. You can’t do it just on Wednesdays, you can’t do it if you
plan of apologizing after, and you can’t do it only if your life is in mortal
danger. Jesus did not qualify His statement with any adjectives. He simply
said, ‘if you deny Me, I will deny you!’

We
can’t allow for personal opinion when it comes to Scripturally established
issues, and though we might be tempted to twist ourselves into a pretzel trying
to make these passages say something they don’t, the truth is far simpler, if
ever more unpleasant a thing to contend with for the flesh.

‘Whoever denies
Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven.’ Seems pretty
straightforward to me, but then again, I don’t have the weight of a seminary
degree to tilt my perception to the left.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

It
happened sooner than I thought it would, and that is not a good thing. A United
States citizen was beheaded on U.S. soil, of all places in Oklahoma. There will
be plenty of people trying to spin this story and call it workplace violence,
or some other politically correct euphemism, but the reality is what it is, and
no amount of spin can change it.

A
woman was beheaded in America, by a man who professed to be a Muslim convert.

To
all of you who left the lovely comments about me being a fear monger, hate
monger, war monger, intolerant of other cultures and whatnot a couple weeks ago
when I wrote my article on moral equivalency, what say you now?

How
many will it take for this nation to wake up and realize that it’s not the
Bible bangers, Jesus freaks, turn or burn crowd, or churchgoers that are the imminent
danger?

Will
it take five? Will it take ten? Will it take fifty beheadings throughout this
country before it becomes impossible to cover up the truth of what is
happening?

This
is the inevitability of what occurs when you glamorize sadists. This is what
happens when you show the guys in the ninja suits walking in slow motion,
carrying their black flags in the desert, and never mention that they likely
smell like stale sweat and week old sheep lard, or that they’ve likely never
been privy to a running shower. Am I profiling? No, not in the way you might
think. Are the brain dead among us going to miss the point of this post
altogether and start ranting about how I’ve proven my intolerance?It is likely.

We’ve
romanticized murderers and homicidal psychopaths, but this is nothing new. It has
been going on for long and long, from Charles Manson, to the two brothers in
Boston a couple years ago, to a handful of others the mass media has decided to
glamorize and romanticize as though they were something other than the sick and
evil twists they are.

I
have always been a prepare for the worst, and hope for the best sort of guy.
Oddly enough, I think the worst most folks are preparing for is far less than
the reality we will be confronted with will be. When you place butchers among
sheep, even a handful can rack up a hefty body count.

For
the most part, I cannot say most people are ill equipped, but they are ill
prepared for the brutality with which these individuals are pursuing their
agenda, and the inevitable reality that if such events increase in number and frequency,
their lives will forever be changed.

What
can we do but steel ourselves? What can we do but be prayed up, and certain of
our place in God? What can we do but what we’ve been doing for long and long,
and simply be faithful servants of Christ Jesus even unto death?

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

There
are certain expressions, within certain contexts that really get my goat. It’s
not just that they’re annoying and foolhardy, they actually make me angry.
Although the list hasn’t grown for a while, of late I have steadily been adding
expressions to it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me getting older and becoming
more of a curmudgeon, but in hindsight I think anger and annoyance are the
proper response to these expressions.

For
long and long, somewhere at the top of my list were either the drunk drivers or
texting tweens who plowed into an innocent and killed them, employing the go to
line, ‘I wish it was me instead of them.’
I’m sure you do. I’m sure the individual’s family wishes it were so as well,
but if wishes were horses we’d all have stables, and there would be allot more
cowboys about.

Every
time I hear the line, it just angers me instantly. You chose to drink and
drive, you chose to text and drive, you took a life because you were reckless
and foolish, and you wishing it’d been you and a quarter will get you a stick
of gum, if that.

Another
expression that really gets me fired up is ‘he
is a good boy,’ within the context of some testosterone filled young man or
another doing something truly awful, then having his aged mother come to his
defense. Obviously he is not a good boy, madam! He shot three people, killed
one, and tried to run over a police officer with his car. He is not a good boy,
and you saying it does not change the reality of what he has become. Perhaps,
when he was younger, playing with his Legos or Tonka trucks he was a good boy,
but now he is a full grown adult who has taken a human life, and his having
been a good boy at one point does not change the present reality.

Now
lately I’ve been hearing another expression coming from America’s spiritual
luminaries, and it has the capacity to infuriate me more than any other. If we
were to look back, I believe the originator and purveyor of this expression is
none other than everyone’s favorite theological powerhouse Joel Osteen.

Whenever
any pastor who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty is asked about his opinion
on homosexual marriage, polygamy, or any of a dozen other aberrant practices,
they put on the plastic smile and deliver the line they must have practiced in
the mirror a hundred times: ‘Well, I don’t
believe it’s God’s best for them.’

Oh,
really? Not God’s best? Is it that difficult to utter the word sin? Is it that
difficult to grow a spine and say with the conviction requisite your station
that it is in fact a sinful act, and if not repented of will lead men to
damnation?

By
this logic, whatever it is that men practice, whatever perversion or sinful
act, simply isn’t God’s best. Are you a polygamist, a pedophile, or a zoophile?
Well, you know, it’s not God’s best don’t you? Is this the most accurate
Biblical answer we can give? We couldn’t come with something more substantial,
or dare I say Scriptural?

We’re
not even talking about lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, licentiousness, avarice,
greed, or covetousness anymore. These things are so rampant within the church
that to speak against them would be to empty out an entire congregation faster
than if someone rolled a live grenade down the center aisle. We are talking
about things that God Himself sees as abominations, and it is these things that
our spiritual better see not as sin,
but simply not God’s best!

Thursday, September 18, 2014

For
the most part the watchmen are no more. Some just grew weary and disillusioned
and out of utter frustration abandoned the watchtower, and to be perfectly
honest, I don’t blame them. I’ve been there, experienced the frustration,
constantly feeling as though I was just screaming into the void, having my
words misunderstood, being made to wonder why I put myself through it all, if
perhaps I’m just an intellectual masochist who needs to feel pain to know he’s
alive. But, since I’ve never been a quitter, and there are extenuating
circumstances to consider such as standing before God one day, I press on, each
day wearier than its predecessor, taking delight in the little things life
offers when they are offered.

Others,
more shrewd and self-serving absconded as well, but not before ransacking the
castle treasury and taking as much as they could carry. Either way, the end
result is no more watchmen on the wall, and that ought to be a thing of great
concern for all.

Meanwhile
the people of the city revel as though the enemy were not at the gate, and as
though they were not in imminent and mortal danger. Even though something
doesn’t feel right, most choose to ignore it, finding more distractions to fill
their time rather than seriously consider what is happening all around them.
Sometimes truth itself is overwhelming. The magnitude of it, the sheer force of
it, will often paralyze an individual for an instant or for the rest of their
lives depending on their constitution, but I would rather have the truth than
the lie any day of the week.

I
have epiphanies in the strangest places. One such place was an asylum for the
mentally insane in Romania, during a visit to see how we could help, whether monetarily,
with foodstuffs, clothes, or any other things we had available at the time.

The
doctor in charge asked if I would like a tour, and since I’d never been to an
insane asylum before I nodded in the affirmative, and we began the walkthrough.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I grew up in the early nineties, and
snuck over to the neighbors often enough to watch television to have formed an
opinion as to what I was going to see. It was nothing like that. Yes, some of
the residents were obviously disturbed, but most were just sitting alone by
themselves, either drawing or playing with some object or another.

There
was one woman that drew my eye, not because of how she looked, but because of
what she was doing. She looked normal enough, had on a bathrobe, and her hair
was combed, but she was standing in the corner and bleating like a sheep. The
whole time we talked, the whole time we walked through the recreational area,
this woman did not move, she just stood in the corner, facing the wall, and
bleated.

‘Does
she ever stop I asked the doctor?’

‘Not
unless she’s heavily medicated,’ he answered, ‘what else does she have to do
anyway?’

That’s
when I had my epiphany. What else do the instigators, flame throwers, baiters, the
professionally offended, and the litigiously prone have to do?

Other
than the clear departure from godliness, one of the things that has brought
about the sad state of affairs we currently find ourselves in is that we’ve
given ear to the crazies, and not only that but convinced them that they are
not in fact crazy, but perfectly sane when calling for the wholesale slaughter
of one ethnic group or another, the murder of unborn babies without apology,
the destruction of the family, or a dozen other things that I would rather not
go into because I’m about to put my daughter to bed, and I want to be able to
smile at her.

We
pander to the lowest common denominator, and elevate them to celebrity status.

Case
and point, there are tens upon tens of thousands of men and women serving in
the armed forces, and honorably so, and other than the thirty second blurb from
time to time informing us that they are not being given the medical attention
and treatment they rightly deserve for having served this country, they are
rarely mentioned.

One
of them decides to put on a skirt, some lipstick and some eyeliner, and he gets
an hour long special on one of the premiere news outlets of this nation.

Are
you married with children working hard just to get by? Eh, so what, you’re
boring.

Are
you barely twelve, unwed, and on your second pregnancy? Perfect! We’ll give you
a television show.

And
so, the state of affairs gets sadder still, until it did not surprise me one
bit when an effeminate fellow called me a breeder under his breath as he
attempted to sit my family and I in a restaurant recently.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

There
is a most dangerous theory making its way through the ether infecting both
believers and non-believers alike. It would seem at the height of political
correctness, it decided to couple with utter idiocy, and this theory is their lovechild.
It pains me to hear anyone spout such nonsense, but it pains me doubly so when I
hear believers defend this nonsense in their never ending quest to be relevant,
edgy, cool, non-offensive, and all inclusive.

The
theory I speak of is that of moral equivalency. In the eyes of the proponents
of this theory, there is absolutely no difference between the little old lady
dressed in her best outfit making her way up the church steps on a Sunday
morning clinging to her Bible, and the bloodthirsty brute who in the name of
his god slaughters innocent men, women, and children with no more a dilemma regarding
the matter than one would have between ordering the chicken or the pasta on a
transatlantic flight.

Even
to one who could never be accused of brilliance or genius, the stark difference
is evident between the two. One of these things is not like the other, yet
many, some even within Christendom insist on the notion of moral equivalency,
as though that is some excuse for murder and mayhem.

We
are reticent to call things by their proper name in this country due to
political correctness, and I fear the day will come when our insistence upon
this foolishness will be our own undoing.

I’m
sorry to be blunt, but if you believe the dad trying to keep a roof over his
family’s head and food on the table while teaching his kids a sense of morals
in an world absent morals by taking them to church on Sunday morning is on par,
and on equal moral footing with guys who go around crucifying people and
beheading them, then you’re an idiot and there is nothing I can do to help you.

Yes,
I know, the overly sensitive will be all aflutter because I called a certain
and by my estimation quite large segment of the population idiots, but it’s a
little late in the day to sugarcoat things for the sake of sparing the crazies
their feelings.

My
next article will be called ‘The Sad State of Affairs’ and it will tackle how we
got here, and yes, a large, overwhelming part of it has to do with promoting,
elevating, and honoring the crazies and the perverts of our society rather than
seek to show them the error of their ways.

But
back to today’s rant….

To
the proponents of moral equivalency, and those who continue to trumpet the
lunacy that there is no difference whatsoever between Christianity and Islam, perhaps
it will take some goat herder or failed rapper standing behind your kneeling
form, cupping your chin, and gleefully sawing away at arteries and viscera to
make you realize that the danger lay elsewhere, and not in the group of
individuals whose only form of condoned killing, is to kill folks with
kindness.

To
those believers who continue to insist upon this theory and support it, I say
stop embarrassing yourselves and making yourselves look the fool. If you
believe these two opposing religions to be on equal moral footing, then you don’t
know Jesus, you don’t know the message of the cross, nor do I believe were you
truly saved and renewed in mind and heart. Take a long hard look in the mirror,
contemplate the things you have been saying, and for the sake of all sane,
rational folks who are trying their utmost to continue pointing the way to
Jesus, and highlighting the fact that He is unique, one of a kind, Lord, King, and
Master, shut up.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The
main stream media has a new evangelical darling, and all it took was for him to
blurt out something they agreed wholeheartedly with to make him a sensation, a
star, an up and coming theological powerhouse the likes of which we have not
seen since Joel Osteen.

In
a moment of profound umbrage, fed up with being fed up, a pastor of some
sixteen thousand congregants recently declared, ‘I’m done with stupid rules’, and that’s all it took for this
profoundly simplistic utterance to go viral.

I
don’t know the man, I don’t presume to judge the man – in the end God will
judge us all anyway so why should I tire myself out – but his words got me to
thinking about a broader implication, and why it is we are seeing such a
lethargic, impotent, woefully inept and ignorant church prancing about as
though they’ve seized upon the key to all wisdom for the first time in human
history.

Whether
Jesus is your Lord and your King, or He has become an idol of your own making,
is the key to determining how you live your life, how you conduct yourself, and
how you will view the ‘stupid rules’
set about in Scripture, spoken by none other than Christ Jesus, such as daily
denying oneself, picking up our crosses, and following after Him.

You
obey a Lord, you obey a King, but you don’t have to obey an idol. An idol can
be anything you want it to be, demanding nothing of you for it can make no
demands. It is an idol, formed by the hands of men, worshipped for no other
reason than to placate the burdened conscience, and compel certain individuals
to think of themselves as spiritual.

All
idols require is worship. Jesus demands transformation.

Rather
than being Lord of their lives, for many a soul today, Jesus has become an
idol. Jesus is whatever they want Him to be, whatever they need Him to be,
without the burdensome issues of obedience, servitude, self-denial, regeneration,
transformation, and other things we need not fret ourselves with, muddying up
the waters.

We
want Jesus on our terms, He wants us on His terms, and the only way we’ve found
to get around this sticky wicket, is to pretend to worship and obey Jesus, but
a Jesus of our own construct, who doesn’t have any of those stupid rules, who doesn’t require any
life change, who doesn’t demand repentance, or a breaking of ties with the
darkness, but is simply overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of you sitting in
a pew every other Sunday chewing gum and wondering when the service is going to
be over, or if you’re going to have to wait in line at the local buffet if the
preacher drags the closing prayer on longer than he ought.

This
is largely the reason the Western Christian cannot wrap their minds around men
and women being martyred for the cause of Christ, unwilling to deny Him,
unwilling to betray Him, but going to their deaths faithful to the end as a
true servant ought.

You
can change idols easily enough, but to change Kings is to knowingly betray your
King for His enemy, to knowingly become a traitor to He who has shown you
boundless love, mercy, grace and goodness.

You
hear these inane ruminations that could only come from the mind of a lazy,
fattened, ignorant, casual Christian,
such as ‘why didn’t they just lie and say
they would convert to Islam’, or ‘why
didn’t they just cross their fingers and say whatever the masked men wanted
them to?’

Because
they understood the difference between worshipping an idol, and serving a King!
They understood, and paid the ultimate price, fully understanding what it means
to follow those stupid rules, and lay
down your life for the cause of Christ.

At
this point, we the Christians of America ought to burn with shame. Our cheeks
ought to glow red, we ought to avert our gaze, but we have long since lost the
ability to blush, we have long since lost the ability to feel shame, and as
long as there’s one or two luminaries
out there telling us they’re tired of all the stupid rules, or that willful,
continual, habitual sin isn’t really sin, but merely not God’s best for your
life, we stumble ever onward toward eternity, believing wholeheartedly that we’ve
outwitted God, and discovered the loophole that will let us into heaven while
our hearts are firmly tethered to hell.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

When
was the last time your God asked you to behead someone with a knife? How about
to simply kidnap someone and declare them your betrothed, your one and only,
the half that completes you ‘til death does you part? Perhaps it wasn’t an act,
but rather a declaration such as vowing to drown everyone else on the planet except
for your little clique in their own infidel blood. When was the last time God
asked you to make such a declaration? Not recently? Perhaps never?

Yet
here we are, being told by our spiritual betters that all religions are
religions of peace, and the god of each is so similar that it would not be
untoward in the least to broad brush the entire matter and say we all serve the
same god just under different pseudonyms.

Remember
that time, in the not so distant past when religious leaders of every stripe
were falling all over themselves trying to be the first to lick the boot of
power and echo the ramblings of other fools who said that we had nothing to
concern ourselves over in regards to the religion of peace? Remember how we
were told time and again that all they do is bake muffins for the cripple, make
paper-mache dolls for pyromaniac adolescents, and knit booties for three
legged kittens? We just thought they were different because they had
beards…never mind the meat cleaver in the grizzled gentleman’s hand, go give
him a hug.

There
is politically driven rhetoric, there is religiously driven rhetoric, but what
stinks worse than a rotting carcass in the midday sun is politically driven
religious rhetoric. For the sake of a seat at the table that never
materialized, your spiritual leaders betrayed you, sold you out, pimped you
out, deceived you, and lied right to your face.

They
were almost sycophantic in their demeanor, slavish in their devotion, ever
eager to parrot the nonsense they were fed, about us just not understanding
traditional quirks and so finding such things as dismemberment, mutilation,
decapitation, torture, murder, rape, and slave owning off-putting was done so
out of ignorance rather than out of a justified sense of moral outrage.

We
were purpose driven right into heresy, and anyone who tried to warn that these
people neither walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, nor wanted to hug you,
were branded haters and closed minded.

What
I want to know now is if such esteemed luminaries as Rick Warren will own their
words, or backpedal as though their life depended on it, insisting that they
didn’t say what we thought they said, and if they did say it then we heard it
wrong, and even if we heard it right, we’re only talking about a small, minute,
infinitesimal number of individuals, a few hundred thousand at most, who want
to see us drown in our own blood, so what’s the big deal anyway?

Sometimes
the foolishness of fools is breathtaking to behold, and what’s even more
astounding is that no one calls them out on it. Will anyone ever point to that
Hillsong fellow and call him a deceiver and a heretic? Likely not because they
have good music, and he’s more of a positive motivator than one of those stuffy
preachers who insist on sanctification and the such. He never claimed to know
the Bible, or teach the Bible, but rather to inspire people to be better
versions of themselves, to be positive, to believe in prosperity, or whatever
else rehashed drivel is popular nowadays.

If
the sheep didn’t love it, such shepherds would cease to exist. Because the
sheep love to be deceived, because they are willing to believe even the most
aberrant of lies if it means that they can hang on to their sin, then it’s
alright by them, and when they are told that murderers, rapists, and other such
fellows who revel in the taking of life and shedding of blood worship the
selfsame god that they do, they nod their heads, and smile, and go on about
their day.

Friday, September 5, 2014

I
tried. I really did. I stopped watching the news altogether, only glanced at
the headlines on my homepage from time to time, and didn’t even read the free
newspaper anymore; in short I did everything I could to avoid current events,
thereby being able to likewise avoid talking about or writing about current
events. I took a page out of man an American pastor’s playbook and surmised
that ignorance was indeed bliss, and if I could remain ignorant of what is
going on, the bliss would continue unabated.

It
worked for a while. We’ve been busy with the baby, she’s just this amazing gift
that does something new and precious and unique and astounding every day it
seems, but even though I avoided seeking out the news, it came to me
nevertheless.

Friends
and brothers keep sending e-mails, e-mails I inevitably open, with links to
articles, and opinion pieces, and breaking news of varying kinds.

I’m
the kind of person that if something is gnawing at me, eventually that thing bleeds
over into everything else, and unless extricated, leeched out of my system by
way of addressing it, it begins to slowly affect other areas which have no
tangential connection.

As
such I am taking a short break from discussing the first epistle of Peter, and
penning a few articles about what’s been gnawing at me of late.

For
those of you who are squeamish, insist on political correctness, or get the
vapors at the slightest provocation, I would suggest you stay away for the next
few days, since what’s been banging around in my head isn’t pretty, but is
true.

I’ve
been waiting for someone to say it so I wouldn’t have to, but no one has, and I
feel as though I must.

As
soon as my intellectual detoxification is complete, we will return to our
discussion of 1 Peter. For those of you who were looking forward to continuity,
I apologize in advance, but knowing myself, this is for the best. I hope you
understand.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

It
is said we are all born with two primary fears. Every one of us is born with
the fear of falling, and the fear of loud noises. Every other fear we must
learn through experience, we must learn through education, and we must learn
through practice.

‘No
Fear’ might be a great tag line for a t-shirt, but there are some thing we
ought to fear, and rightly so. I fear getting electrocuted, so I don’t go
around licking live wires. I fear being mauled to death, so I don’t go around
slapping grizzly bears across the snout. I fear God, knowing He is just and
holy, so I do my utmost to be what He expects me to be which is nothing less
than holy.

It
is not as though the time of our sojourning here is inconsequential. If it
were, then it is doubtful God would have included so many warnings in the Bible
as to how we ought to conduct ourselves while sojourning here. It is because
there are consequences to our actions while we journey here, and it is because
how we conduct ourselves while here is important that God inspired it to be
included in the Word.

There
are certain fears we, as children of God ought never to have, and at the top of
the list, number one with a bullet, is the fear of man. It is because we do not
fear God that we fear man. Yes, the preceding statement was profound in its
simplicity.

When
we fear God, there is no fear of man to be had. When we fear men, then there is
no fear of God to be had. You cannot fear man and God equally, and as such you
must choose to fear one or the other.

So
why is it that we have lost the fear of the Lord in our modern age? Why is it
that we no longer fear God? We no longer fear God because as is the case with
so many things, our modern age has stripped of meaning, some of the most
profound truths.

‘And if you call
on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work,
conduct yourselves throughout the time of your sojourning here in fear;’

If
you call God Father, then you already know that He judges without partiality
according to each one’s work. In calling God Father, there is a certain level
of intimacy that one must assume, and a certain level of knowledge that one
reasonably expects to exist.

Even
a word as often used as father has been so butchered, that men today call God
Father, without understanding what the word means, and without having the
requisite relationship a father has with his son or daughter.

Is
God your Father? What does the word Father mean to you?

Does
the word father mean the individual who provided, cared for, protected,
disciplined, taught, instructed, and loved you throughout your life, because
that is what the word father means! It is not simply about biology, it’s not about
seeing a picture of someone who is long gone, having abandoned his family, and
being told they are your father.

This
is partly the reason why our reaction toward the reality that God is our Father
is so tepid and lifeless. It is because the word has been redefined, or because
at least 50% of individuals today have a negative association with the word.

‘I was with you
up to this point preacher, but come on are you insinuating that people’s
perception of a word’s definition has a direct effect as to how they react
toward it?’

Yes,
that is what I am saying, not insinuating, but saying. Look at men’s definition
of the word sin over the past few decades, and you will see that I am right.
Sin used to be defined as death, and as such, men used to guard their hearts
against it, and be ever vigilant in their walk.

Now
that sin has become a relative term, a moral choice upon which another
individual cannot pass judgment because everyone defines sin differently, the
church is full of all manner of vile practices, and no one says a thing about
it, because they will be smacked across the mouth with the ‘do not judge’ paddle.